COLLECTIBLE BOOKS: Echoes of the Drum
The auction of a book by Schadeberg reminds us of a vital era of SA history
Jürgen Schadeberg, the Drum photographer who introduced photojournalism to SA, took his first photographs at the age of 12 during World War 2 in an air-raid shelter in Berlin. When he became the “carefree” chief photographer of Drum, he captured the atmosphere of Sophiatown in the 1950s, a period which many regard as the high point of SA’s urban black culture. White Man in a Black World by Robert von Lucius, a section in the book, Schadeberg, deals with Schadeberg’s experiences in Sophiatown before forced removals of the inhabitants. It was described as the Black Paris, and offered the jazz, dance halls and bars of the townships which Schadeberg found so cheerful. He saw it as an escape from the boredom of the white man’s urban lifestyle of tea rooms, cricket games and the cinema. He was not highly regarded by whites, who shunned him, some even regarding him as crazy. Yet it was he who helped establish the Drum style of “combining culture and politics”. Some go so far as to say that...
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